Subject: Re: Understanding #:substitutable? and #55231

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2025 14:42:24 +0100

Hello,

Am Sun, Feb 09, 2025 at 10:42:26PM +0000 schrieb Morgan Arnold via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.:
> It might be more correct to allow derivations built with non-substitutable native inputs to be substitutable nonetheless. The alternative seems like it could cause issues, in particular with the non-substitutable texlive package being used as a native input to build documentation.

just to clarify, texlive (or more precisely, texlivetexmf) is marked as
non substitutable not because it would not be allowed, but because it is
huge and essentially just an unpacked big tarball. So people had better
build the package by themselves.

And it should not be used as a (native-)input to other packages: We have
the much smaller modular texlive packages for this, which make it
possible to depend precisely on what is needed to build the
documentation.

Andreas